Review: ‘To The Rest of the World’ by Trail

London’s Trail are the sort of band you might have liked as a pre-teen, but probably didn’t because even then you realised that they weren’t very good. The ten tracks that make up the album are epically over-produced, riff-driven, hook-heavy, stadium-rock ballads that might one day, a long time ago, have had the potential to attract attention. But those days have been long forgotten.

Nowadays, to write songs like these is to enter a musical minefield in which all the worst things about rock and pop go hand-in-hand with the suicidal error of taking yourself far too seriously (there’s something annoyingly presumptuous about naming your album To the Rest of the World). A few songs, the opening ‘Prism’ for example, begin with a glimmer of potential, and there are moments when the guitar sounds like it might morph into something interesting, but any sense of individuality is soon drowned out by the overly long and predictably structured song writing that dominates the monotonous sound of the album.

On ‘Back Home’, Trail abandon this sound in favour of a more vocally driven approach, and singer Charlie Afif’s falsetto floats pleasantly with the accompanying guitar. This could have been the album’s redeeming feature, were it not for the insertion of a totally unnecessary fifty second guitar solo and the tragic lyrical writing: ‘and if it rains then I will find my coat, and if it sails then I will get my boat’.

It is hard to pin down what each song is about, seeming to just be a series of impressive sounding words strung together that apparently make no sense whatsoever. You’d be just as well off downloading ‘Fumes’, the album’s best track, and listening to it ten times than wasting money or memory space on this album. Pleasant, but painfully unoriginal.